Huawei Returns to RSA With Anti-DDoS Appliance

By Jeffrey Burt |
Posted 2014-02-24

Huawei Returns to RSA With Anti-DDoS Appliance

Huawei Technologies came to the annual RSA Conference for the first time last year, part of its ongoing efforts to introduce enterprises in the United States to the broad portfolio the giant Chinese tech vendor offers.

Huawei officials were back at the RSA show Feb. 24, unveiling the company's AntiDDoS8000 Series of solutions aimed at repelling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Like some of the other products Huawei has rolled out in the United States, the AntiDDoS8000 has been deployed elsewhere in the world, according to Ian Foo, director of product marketing and management for Huawei's Product Marketing and Management unit. Huawei officials believe the product will find traction in the United States, given its track record elsewhere and the scalability of the platform, Foo told eWEEK.

"There is just nothing comparable to it in its class," he said.

The AntiDDoS8000 Series offer up to 1-terabit-per-second performance against the rising number and variety of DDoS attacks, including those from the application layer and mobile devices, according to Huawei officials. The appliance leverages such features as signature learning, behavior analysis, reputation mechanism and big data analytics to defend against several-hundred-gigabits-per-second DDoS attacks, they said.

The AntiDDoS8000 appliance is available now, and in the fourth quarter, Huawei will release a 160G-bps service card. The company also will offer a high-density line card with ten 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, enabling the largest model of the appliance to support as much as 960G bps of performance.

The appliance can detect and mitigate more than 100 DDoS attacks and can prevent outbound DDoS attacks from the data center via a botnet library of 5 million active botnet IP addresses that is updated daily.

Huawei, the world's second-largest telecommunications networking vendor, has been a strong global player in the enterprise networking space and a significant rival to industry leader Cisco Systems. It offers a broad range of other products, from servers to mobile devices.

For the past three years, the company has been aggressive in courting enterprises in general and the U.S. market in particular, with its headquarters here in Santa Clara, Calif. Forrester Research analyst Frank Liu wrote in a post on the firm's blog that Huawei in 2013 generated $2.5 billion in enterprise revenue, a 33 percent increase over 2012 but still below the company's expectations.

According to reports out of China, Huawei executives will focus on a number of areas, from big data and improving the company's channel strategy to recruiting executives from competitors and keeping pricing down, Liu wrote.

"Huawei wants to improve the margin on its enterprise products, but as a new player in the enterprise market, it's difficult," he wrote. "Huawei can improve its margins but must maintain its price advantage in order to compete with global vendors and push more innovative products in storage or cloud computing."

Huawei Returns to RSA with Anti-DDoS Appliance

In the United States, a lot of attention has been given to the difficulty Huawei has had breaking into the enterprise networking market, due in large part to concerns by lawmakers and regulators that the vendor's close ties to the Chinese government have made it a security risk, something that company executives have denied. U.S. officials fear that Huawei's telecom equipment—including networking hardware like switches and routers—could include back doors that would give the Chinese government access to U.S. networks and sensitive data, and could become a launching pad for cyber-attacks. That led Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei to say the company is no longer interested in selling telecommunications equipment in the United States.

The RSA even gave the company another opportunity to showcase its technologies. The company is rapidly expanding in the data center, and security will be an important part of that push, according to Jane Li, chief operating officer for Huawei Enterprise USA.

"As we move into SDN [software-defined networking] and the cloud and network-function virtualization, security will be more and more important, so I think it's important to talk to [enterprises] about what we've done [in that area]," Li told eWEEK. "It's always been a significant part of our R&D investment."

Huawei's Loo said security is not new to Huawei, but what the company offers in that area is probably new to U.S. organizations. Huawei has to work to increase the familiarity, and he believes adoption will follow.

"We have to earn the confidence of [enterprises] as a security player," he said. "I think that's expected of any vendor."